The Swift by Sarah Cheveau

Swimming through the sky, exploring, circling: in this book we closely follow the flying feats of a swift, dancing through the air as it gathers twigs, feathers, and threads to build its nest in a city building. With profound lightness, Sarah Cheveau tells us about urban biodiversity, taking us into the clouds, with the Merano skyline looming on the horizon, to look down on it from a new point of view.

The Swift is the seventh book in the series created for "Primavera a Merano", an event that showcases the area's extraordinary natural and cultural heritage, giving people the chance to discover - or rediscover - Merano in a new and exciting way. Lipu has also given its backing to this book, in the words of Danilo Selvaggi, Director General of Lipu - BirdLife Italia: “The swift eats in flight, sleeps in flight, "swims in flight", and traces out paths that brighten our spring and summer days. The summer sky is almost at one with these birds. Lipu loves and protects them in many different ways, and this delightful project by Sarah Cheveau helps make them even more fascinating.”

Following short stories by Harriet Russell (2015), Katrin Stangl and Michael Heinze (2016), Steven Guarnaccia (2017), Alessandro Sanna (2018), Noemi Vola (2019) and Andrea Antinori (2020), Sarah Cheveau tells the story of the city from the perspective of a swift, a migratory bird that comes to Merano in spring. The project is inspired by the collection at Ópla, the Children's Book Archive of the Merano Municipal Library, which has been based in Merano since 1997.